Photos feature healing around world

The photograph shows a 104-year-old medicine man in Monument Valley, Ariz. The caption says he believes running is the secret to long life.

"Until I was eighty-four, I ran three miles a day," John Parrish says in the caption. "In the winter, I would run in the snow with only my underwear on."

In another photograph, taken in the former Soviet Union, eight eye patients, looking as though they're on an assembly line, simultaneously receive surgery.

And in a third, shot in the southern African nation of Swaziland, a woman and her trainees are bent over, studying a series of items: dice, sea shells, bones and dominoes.

If the objects land upright, the patient will be fine. If they land facing downward, that is a bad omen, and the patient may die.

Part of Harbor Hospital Center's 90th anniversary celebration, "The Power to Heal: Ancient Arts and Modern Medicine" is an exhibition of 60 color and black-and-white photographs illustrating health-care methods, healing and wellness ideas from around the world.

"We're really excited. It's a totally unique exhibit, and you don't have to be in medicine to appreciate the power of the photos," said Clark E. Jeunette, vice president of the hospital's corporate communications.

The exhibit is on display from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays through Jan. 10. Weekend visits can be arranged by calling Ann Heil at 347-3478.

The exhibit arrived from Florida and will head to Indiana in mid-January after its run here, said Jackie Breeden, director of public relations for the hospital.

The pictures were shot in the fall of 1989 by a team of more than 100 of the world's most famous photojournalists.

The result was "The Power to Heal," a book and exhibition directed by Rick Smolan, creator of the best selling "A Day in the Life" series; Phillipp Moffitt, former Esquire editor-in-chief, and Matthew Naythons, a physician and photojournalist.

The pictures give "a global perspective to medicine and what's being done elsewhere and how much further advanced we are technologically," said Chris Papadopoulos, chief of cardiology at the hospital.

Shahid Aziz, vice president of medical affairs and director of pediatrics at the hospital, said, "We think of what's here as the only way to do it. I think the humanistic side of medicine comes across really nicely [in the exhibit]. America is just a completely different world when it comes to practicing medicine."

One day last week, three women, in the hospital visiting their mother, who has cancer, visited the exhibit.

The women, who live in Pasadena, said they thought the exhibit was great because of its breadth and because looking at various approaches to healing, wellness and medicine might inspire medical discoveries.